All Good People Here

Flowers is the host and executive producer of numerous podcasts (The Deck, Supernatural, and Crime Junkie) for the Audiochuck Podcast Network. In her debut novel, All Good People Here, Flowers creates a narrative that draws both from her interest in true crime and her experience of growing up in small-town Indiana. Many of the crimes Flowers and her co-host, Brit Prawat, cover on the podcast Crime Junkie are based in Indiana. Wakarusa, Indiana, a real town, is also the setting of the book. Flowers thanks Prawat in the acknowledgments section of the book: “We also could not have made this book feel so authentic without those who contributed their expertise on subject matter: My best friend, Brit Prawat, who grew up in Wakarusa and helped me make the town feel real” (311). Flowers herself grew up in nearby South Bend, Indiana, another prominent location within the text.

Flowers’s experience growing up in Indiana and its surrounding areas contributes to her understanding of midwestern culture: the benefits and downsides of small-town life. The title of the text, All Good People Here, evokes the small-town platitudes often associated with Midwest American states: everyone knowing everyone in town, a natural mistrust of strangers, and an insatiable desire for neighborhood gossip, paired with the insistence that the townspeople are all “churchgoing, law-abiding, capital-G Godfearing people” (3).